


False Dichotomies

by TinoSquint



Series: The Angst in the Episodes [1]
Category: Bones (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-25
Updated: 2017-06-25
Packaged: 2018-11-18 17:13:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11295096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TinoSquint/pseuds/TinoSquint
Summary: My take on how Booth and Brennan react to their first case as partners. They're both stuck on some things they said...okay, mostly on things Brennan said. They're trying to cope with their feelings about each other as well as about how their interactions affected the other. This one is pretty angsty, but not all of them will be this angst heavy.Cross-posted on ff.net





	False Dichotomies

**Author's Note:**

> Hi guys, so this is my first real attempt at a fanfic. The plan is to do a story for every episode as I rewatch, so I don't know how long this will take me to complete. I'm posting as individual stories in a series because the plan is for there to be eventual smut and I don't want to have to change the rating for the entire series when that happens. The italics are direct quotes from the episodes, which are obviously not mine because I don't own the series. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy this first story, I'll try to have another up soon!

As he drives home after Cleo Eller’s funeral, Booth can’t shake his feelings of frustration. He doesn’t know why she can frustrate him so easily. “She’s just a squint,” he mutters to himself. His brain doesn’t stop there, though. A thought follows his words: “The most beautiful squint I’ve ever met.” 

“No, no, no, you can’t go there, Booth,” he thinks. “She made it clear that’s not what she wants. She made it clear after that first case. She left the damn country and wouldn’t take your calls. You had to have her fake arrested at the airport in order to get her to speak to you for God’s sake!”

That thought works twofold: it helps him stop thinking of her as beautiful—at least for the time being anyway—but it also hurts him. They did a good job together, they helped people when they worked together the first time. So why was she trying so hard to avoid working with him again?

Or was she just trying to avoid him? This thought cuts deeper than it should. He knows that no matter what he feels, he can’t let those feelings intrude on their work together. For some reason, he is desperate to have her in his life. He wants more, but if partners is all they can be, he can settle for that. 

He parks his car in front of his apartment, ready to put this day behind him. It firmly marks the beginning of their partnership. Sure, the case started days ago, but at the funeral today they started building a rapport of partners rather than just two people working together. He moves his thoughts forward, about to climb out of his car, but then a memory strikes him. After they had walked away from the casket at Cleo’s funeral, he told her how he tries to free himself of the weight of his time as a sniper. Her reaction sends chills up his spine, and he can’t decide whether he’s angry or simply hurt.

Booth sits in his car long after he returns to his apartment. He can’t find the motivation to move. He knows he’s being ridiculous, but he can’t help but feel the sting of her words. _“Please, you don’t think there’s some kind of…cosmic balance sheet?”_

His palm twitches as he thinks about it, wanting to lash out in frustration. He grips the steering wheel tighter, knowing he can’t start hitting things every time he’s frustrated. He knows he can never undo what he did as a sniper, knows nothing will bring those people back. But why is it such a silly idea to her that he’d like to make amends? He joined the Army to serve his country, to help other Americans, but sometimes he feels like it was just a waste. How much could he really have helped if the only way he was helping over there was by killing people?

He shakes his head and finally throws open his car door. He can’t let himself go down this road. The people he killed, they were bad people. They wanted to kill more people. By killing them, one at a time, he saved countless lives. But that doesn’t change the fact that it feels wrong. It’s a weight on his conscience everyday and he doesn’t need this damn squint laughing at his way of lightening the burden.

* * *

She laughed at him. He opened up to her, and she laughed at him. She knows laughter was a rational response as there is clearly no higher being watching over the number of lives he has taken, waiting for him to stop an equal number of bad guys. So why does she feel so awful about it? 

Because she cares about him. She doesn’t want to. She doesn’t understand why she does, but she cannot escape the fact that she does. So she offered to help him. _“I’d like to help you with that.”_

She remembers this moment, can replay it in her head as if it’s a video. He smiled in response, yet she can’t help but feel like her words weren’t enough to make up for her mistake.

* * *

“She offered to help,” he reminds himself, trying to will away his anger at her. “She might think it’s silly, but she wants to help you anyway. That means something.” He reaches into his fridge, pulling out leftover pizza, and forces the memory out of his mind. Letting himself linger on this thought is dangerous, both for himself and for their partnership, and he’s not willing to endanger either of those things. 

_“Temperance, partners share things. It builds trust.”  
“Since when are we partners?”_

This memory might hurt more than the other one. This memory shows how little she values him. She may have laughed at his coping mechanism, but that just means she doesn’t understand what he’s been through and how he sees the world. This rebuff, though, says something about how she feels about him. And not a good something. “That was before you opened up to her about being a sniper, Booth,” he reminds himself, trying to keep the pain away.

He thought that putting his neck—hell, his career—on the line to get her in the field made them partners. And he was excited about that idea. He wanted to continue working with her despite how irritating he finds her. Clearly she didn’t feel that way since she didn’t consider him her partner, though.

In that moment, his mind circles back to the first memory. _“I’d like to help you with that.”_

She wants to help him make amends. That means she wants to keep working with him. This thought soothes him as he sits down to eat his dinner.

* * *

Why did she brush him off when he said they were partners? Why didn’t she just accept that fact? “Because you’re afraid of getting close to him, Temperance,” she mumbles, answering her own questions. “If he gets close, it’s too easy for him to hurt you.”

Brennan sees Booth’s potential to get close to her, and it terrifies her. It’s why she pushed him away throughout the case. No matter how badly she wants him to stay distant, part of her wants to draw him in closer. Her brain replays the moment where she let him in, just for a second.

_“I know exactly how the Ellers felt about Cleo. My parents disappeared when I was fifteen nobody knows what happened to ‘em.”_

She told him something that she’s hardly told anyone, something she tries everyday to forget. She reprimands herself for letting him that far in, for giving him the power to use her history against her. But even as she thinks this, she knows that Booth would never knowingly hurt her. She doesn’t know why he won’t, but something within herself assures her that this fact is true.

_“Ya know, being a sniper I – I took a lot of lives. What I’d like to do before I’m done…is try and catch at least that many murderers.”_

In this moment, he let her in just like she had let him in. Maybe that is why she trusts that he won’t hurt her.

_“Please, you don’t think there’s some kind of…cosmic balance sheet?” He looks down, avoiding her gaze, and she realizes she made a mistake. “I’d like to help you with that.”_

As these last words replay in her mind, she realizes she can’t trust that he won’t hurt her. That’s too wide a trust. She didn’t mean to hurt him with her words, but she clearly did. And maybe one day he’ll do that too. 

With this thought, she has another realization: if he accidentally hurts her, she’s going to forgive him, just like he forgave her today. Or at least she thinks he forgave her. But then again, she also didn’t think her cosmic balance sheet comment would hurt him like it did. Brennan reminds herself why she avoids relationships, platonic or otherwise. “You’re not good with people, Temperance, and you don’t understand them. You’re afraid of letting them in because then they have the power to hurt you, and you don’t know how many more times you can handle being hurt.”

* * *

As he finishes his dinner and pushes back from the table, another memory surfaces: _“Don’t be nice to me after I got you in trouble”_  
“Your heart was in the right place”  
“I’m not a heart person. You’re a heart person, I’m a brain person”

_The lack of faith she has in herself cuts him. She may not see it, but she is a heart person._

__“I know exactly how the Ellers felt about Cleo. My parents disappeared when I was fifteen; nobody knows what happened to ‘em.”_ _

_In that moment, Bones showed that she’s not just a brain person. She opened up and told him about something really big from her past entirely on her own. She didn’t need to do that. She told him because she trusted him, to show her empathy for the position the Ellers were in. More than that, it explains why she wants to do this work. It explains why she’s not content to stay in the lab like a normal squint. This work means too much to her, its too personal for her to stay behind. When she’s in the interviews and at the crime scenes, she can get a fuller picture in order to use the bones to solve the case and bring closure to the victims and their families._

_This realization brings Booth back to a place he tries to avoid. His heart aches for her and he wants to help her, to comfort her. He thinks she’s beautiful and complex and strong and he wants to understand more of her complexity. But that’s not what she wants. She doesn’t want to sleep with him, she doesn’t even consider them partners. So unless she shows that she’s changed her mind, he can’t let himself dream of being more to her than what he is._

_“Partners,” he thinks. “Maybe soon she will consider us partners, then maybe I can hope that one day we’ll at least be friends.”_

* * *

_She may have brushed it aside in the moment, but his comment about partners sharing things was in the back of her mind for the rest of the case. So after Cleo’s funeral, she had shared something. In return, he shared something about his past, too. In that moment, she felt like they truly were partners, like Booth was someone safe for her to talk with. Sure, she talks to a lot of people, but it is rare for her to talk with someone. Honestly, she only does that with Angela. To Brennan, talking to someone is surface level, while talking with someone is deeper and more meaningful. And when she thinks about Angela, she is reminded of something else._

__“Honey, you ever think you come off a little distant because you connect too much?”_ Angela’s words make Brennan more afraid of letting people in than she already was. Before, she only had to keep people away so they didn’t hurt her. Angela’s perspective changes things, though. If she truly does connect too much with people, then she has a second reason to push people away. If she connects to deeply with someone, which is apparently a possibility, their pain will cause her pain. Even though she’s tough on the surface, she still feels the pain of her childhood. She survived and is stronger because of it, but that doesn’t take away the difficulties she endured._

_Before she had this revelation, she was trying to work on letting people in. It’s why she told Booth about her parents. Now she’s afraid that’s a mistake. Everything with Booth feels like a mistake today. She wants him, but that would be a mistake. She wants to push him away, but that would be a mistake. She wants to show him some vulnerability, to show that she isn’t just a squint, but that feels like a mistake, too. She doesn’t want to be his partner, but she really does want to be his partner. Everything she feels about this man is either a mistake, a contradiction or both._

_Knowing she isn’t going to make any headway on this issue tonight, she gets off her couch and goes into her bathroom to get ready for bed. As she climbs into bed, her brain takes a different angle on Angela’s statement._

__“Honey, you ever think you come off a little distant because you connect too much?” Angela’s words ring in Brennan’s head as she lies in bed trying to sleep. It is not a thought that had ever crossed her mind before, but maybe there was some truth in Angela’s statement. With Cleo Eller, Brennan felt herself connecting to the bones as if they were a person still. To normal people, when a body no longer has a face, it stops having emotions too. But sometimes Brennan thinks she can understand people’s emotions better after they’re dead, after their flesh is gone. With bones, she can see how they died, and that, in her mind, is one of the most telling things about a person. Cleo, she fought back so hard; she tried to survive, even though she didn’t always want to. There’s a strength in that, a determination._ _

__When people are dying, they don’t put on any facades. They just are. That’s why Brennan connects so much with the victims she identifies, with the people on her table. She isn’t the best at getting around the acts that people put on and the walls they build. She struggles to understand their emotions when they are trying so hard to hide them. Seeing how people react when they’re killed shows Brennan what’s behind those walls. She sees the genuine nature of the person, not the character they’re showing to the world. And maybe that’s morbid, that the easiest way for her to connect is when people have been reduced to their bones, but that’s how she is. When people are dead, she can connect without fear. They’re already dead, so they can’t abandon her like everyone else seems to do._ _

__Although she doesn’t realize it, she has discovered many truths in Angela’s words. She doesn’t think she’s figured it out because her theories seem contradictory._ _

__Theory One: She pushes people away to avoid truly connecting with them so they can’t hurt her. If they don’t connect, they can’t hurt her. If they don’t connect, their pain can’t hurt her. She connects automatically, but she pushes away to keep from connecting on a deeper level to protect herself._ _

__Theory Two: She connects so much that she pushes everyone away to prevent the pain they could bring to her. She connects better with dead bodies, with the remains on her table, because she doesn’t have to be afraid of how they’ll hurt her. In this situation, she is fixing the hurt instead of enduring it. She is cataloguing the last moments in order to bring justice and closure to the victims and their families._ _

__The dichotomy she sees between her two core theories of connecting too much is false, just as the seeming contradiction in Angela’s statement is false. The theories have the same central theme: she tries to avoid deep connections that she thinks will cause her pain. With people, she pushes away to avoid the pain. With remains, she pulls them closer to try to end their pain._ _

__Angela’s statement is incredibly astute: Brennan feels so strongly that she has to compartmentalize and convince everyone—including herself—that she doesn’t feel anything at all. It’s a way of protecting herself._ _

__As Brennan falls asleep, she doesn’t know which of her theories is correct or if Angela’s statement was just false._ _

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you liked it! As I said, this is my first true attempt at writing a fanfic, so I would appreciate any feedback, positive or negative, as long as it's constructive. I have the next two episodes written, but I need to get them edited and I want to have more written before I post. I'll definitely have the next one up by next week, though, potentially sooner if I get positive feedback. I'm also working on a couple other unrelated stories that I hope to finish relatively soon.


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